Book review - Eating on the Wild Side by Jo Robinson
Jo Robinson has written a variety of books on food and agriculture. I’ve read one other book by her that was about how grass fed livestock, or their wild counterparts on a natural diet hunted, are a lot more nutritious than those raised in factory farm settings. This book focused on fruits and vegetables instead, and compared the nutrition of today’s most popular varieties to older heirloom varieties and their wild counterparts. The heirlooms were not necessarily more nutritious, but the wild plants almost always were.
The main point of the book, in the author’s own words, is that, “The universal health advice to eat more fruits and vegetables is woefully out of date. We need good advice on which fruits and vegetables to eat.” This is not only because some varieties are more nutritious than others, but also because certain foods that have been increasingly bred for sweetness can actually damage health. In one study the author cites, 46 overweight men with high cholesterol were divided into two groups. One group stayed completely on their normal diets, while the other group added one apple a day to theirs. The group that ate the apples had higher levels of triglycerides and LDL cholesterol than the control group after 2 months, giving them an increased risk of heart attack and stroke. This is because the particular variety of apples they ate (Golden Delicious) was too low in phytonutrients to lower cholesterol and so high in sugar that it raised their triglycerides.
Aside from having useful charts showing which varieties of fruits and vegetables common at supermarkets are the most healthful, the book also revealed many incorrect notions that need to be revised. One is that heirlooms are better for people. That really depends. The golden delicious apples, for example, are a hundred year old heirloom and among the lowest in nutrients of the popular apple varieties. Another common misconception is that more richly colored food has the most nutrients - again, it really depends. With greens, darker colored ones are better. But with other foods like peaches, the white fleshed varieties have twice as many nutrients as the yellow fleshed varieties. Leaf shape also sometimes plays a role in which plants are the most nutritious - tightly wrapped varieties have leaves that don't get as much sun, and are therefore lower in phytonutrients. Looseleaf varieties have many times more bionutrients.
Finally, it’s not always true that cooked foods lose their nutrients. Some, like spinach, do. But for others, like tomatoes and artichokes, cooking actually increases nutrition. With tomatoes, the heat from cooking breaks down the fruit’s cell walls, making the nutrients more bioavailable. Additionally, it twists lycopene molecules into a different configuration that is easier to absorb.
Overall, this book was very interesting. It was grouped into chapters by fruit/vegetable type, and the author also provided a brief history on how they were domesticated and how the most popular varieties came to be, in addition to which ones are the most healthy. I think it would be particularly good for people on vegan or raw diets to read because without knowing which varieties are very nutritious and which varieties are essentially just sugar water, or which foods have the most nutrients available raw v. cooked, the diets are more likely to fail.
